


Circle of Protection

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [99]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Asgardian Magic (Marvel), Avenger Loki (Marvel), Avenger Reader (Marvel), F/M, Fluff, M/M, Magic, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Protective Loki (Marvel), Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:22:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25043083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: You discover that Loki is somehow sharing his magic with you, and that you can use it to keep yourself safe.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [99]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 8
Kudos: 221





	Circle of Protection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fujipuri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fujipuri/gifts).



> Thank you thank you thank you to the beautiful [fujipuri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fujipuri) for requesting something like this here on AO3! I know that it's not quite what you asked for, but here it is!

It started out as something else entirely. How could either of you have known? At night, when you laid beside him in bed, Loki took to tracing gentle lines against your skin. When he did, he’d let his fingers light up green, and you had a hard time dragging your eyes away from the sight of it. The lights hovered above your skin for a moment or two even after his fingertips trailed away elsewhere, but then, rather than dissipating into nothingness, it was like the light sank into your chest. There was something so intimate about the ritual—more intimate, sometimes, than whatever you’d just finished doing. When you managed to tear your eyes away from the lights to look at his face, he _always_ looked so soft. So peaceful. Some combination of the movement of his hand and the twinkling of his lights always seemed to put the both of you into a trance.

“What is it?” you managed to ask him once, your voice scarcely more than a whisper. You were asking what he was doing, but as gently as you could. The idea of embarrassing or horrifying him into stopping that made your heart ache—actually _ache_.

He hadn’t answered for a long time but, you noted with pleasure, he also didn’t stop. His touch was always especially gentle when he did this. He was downright _reverent_ when he trailed his fingertips against your skin. He never touched you any more solidly than he needed to in order to keep from tickling you. Goosebumps followed in the wake of his touch, one wave only just barely beginning to face before a fresh wave made you shiver. And the _lights_. The lights were warm. They felt like something physical. Even with your eyes closed, you could feel the way they hovered there above you, and you knew the moment they began to dip lower inside you. They had a warmth, an electricity to them, that was unlike anything else you’d ever felt.

“It’s my magic,” he’d said at last. His voice sounded distant, and that made you certain that he was at least as relaxed as you were “You soak it in. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

It was not lost on you, the weight of knowing that this was something so unfamiliar to him, but you did not allow yourself to dwell on that. You laughed quietly, a little off-balance, and lifted a heavy arm to caress his cheek. “It’s because I can’t get enough of you.”

And maybe that was true. It was certainly true that you longed to soak him in. His touch, his kiss, his attention, it was like you could never get enough to sate your fierce desire for him. He’d laughed quietly and looked up to meet your gaze, and you had been absolutely certain that there was something like disbelief in his eyes. Even now, after everything, he sometimes had trouble accepting the knowledge that you loved him. You didn’t let it bother you, though, and instead used it as motivation to keep trying over and over again to show him how you felt.

The lights became something like an inside joke for the two of you, or perhaps just a way to affirm your connection when in common spaces in the Tower. If he walked behind you, he’d trail his fingers against the small of your back and you’d feel a familiar warmth spreading into your skin. At dinner, sometimes he took your hand under the table and laced his fingers through yours. It never took long before that telltale electricity made the hair on your arm stand on end. 

You had to admit that you liked the idea of soaking in his magic. You imagined that it joined with your bloodstream or various parts of your body so that you could keep him close even when he was far away. You knew that was strange, even silly, but it provided undeniable comfort to you on the nights you spent alone. 

It never occurred to you that your body might be holding on to his magic in any other kind of way until one morning when Clint startled you. He hadn’t done it on purpose. Really you were just two people half-asleep, fumbling through the Tower before caffeine could pry your eyelids open. You’d been the one to brew a pot of coffee, and then you settled yourself at the kitchen table with your oversized mug full of it. Maybe the scent had drawn him in. All you really knew is that, one moment, you were gazing blankly at the dark surface of your mug and, the next, Clint was staring at you through a haze of shimmering green light.

It was a shield. 

His eyes were wide. From the look on his face, you got the sense that he might have been spouting off a string of obscenities if he’d been a little more awake. He reached out to touch the shield, only to jerk his hand away immediately, like he’d been burned. 

How were you supposed to make it go away? You started to stand up, and the shield deformed and stretched so as to continue covering you even as you rose to your full height, but it remained intact. You touched it, and felt no pain, only the familiar feeling of Loki’s magic. That kept you from panicking. Sure, you had no idea what had just happened, and you had no idea how to make it stop happening, but, in the end, it was from Loki. It couldn’t hurt you. 

You tried simply forcing it back into your body with your mind, and had some success. The shield dimmed a little. Clint’s face became a little clearer. You tried touching the shield again, remembering how the lights always seemed drawn-in by your skin, and, slowly, it disappeared. You couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more warmth somewhere in your chest, but probably that was just in your head, right? 

At Tony’s behest, and Clint’s, Bruce ran an endless string of experiments on you. Loki seemed a little wary. He insisted on being there to watch the experiments play out, and hovered around the edge of the lab with his arms crossed and his face tight. You weren’t a fan of being experimented on either, really, but you trusted Bruce implicitly and knew his intentions could only be good. 

He didn’t have much of an explanation. Your vitals were fine. Your body was normal—you just appeared to have some kind of secret reserve of Asgardian magic. It didn’t hurt you to use it. Hell, it didn’t _really_ hurt anyone else to use it, either: your shield was mostly defensive. If someone got too close, like Clint had that morning in the kitchen, they’d get a quick, sharp little shock, but even extended contact with the shield didn’t lead to any kind of permanent damage to anyone else. Bruce and Loki helped you figure out how to manage the shield. Loki told you how he manipulated his own magic, and you found that you had a pretty easy time doing the same with your own. Over time, if you used it a lot all at once, you did feel the magic start to drain away a little. The lovely warmth in your chest would cool a bit, and you would feel yourself start to wilt. When that happened, Loki could “recharge” your stores by trailing his magic along your skin like he always did.

The first time he did that, you tried to pull away from him. If the magic in you was limited, wasn’t the magic in _him_ also limited? You didn’t want to take it from him. He looked stricken when he felt you recoil, but you were quick to explain yourself. That made him laugh, there in the lab, and pull you in more tightly against his body, and he assured you that that was not how it worked.

That was a little hard for you to believe, especially since he hadn’t realized that _this_ was possible before you’d thrown your first shield, but you allowed his words to comfort you all the same.

Slowly, you incorporated his magic into your fighting style. You’d always preferred to stay on the defensive—stealth over brawn had been your unofficial motto for as long as you’d been here on the team—so, as you grew more comfortable with throwing shields at will, rather than just when you were startled, you incorporated them into your fights. The shields worked against Loki, too. You would have thought that impossible, since it was _his_ magic, but he could not break through them any more easily than anyone else. He trained with you a lot (certainly _not_ because you both enjoyed the feeling of grappling with each other and pinning the other to the mats), and you began to recognize a type of pride in his face every time you defended yourself against his attacks. He _liked_ it when you defended yourself against him.

He didn’t stop touching you at night. Most of the time, he remained as quiet as he’d always been, like he was hypnotized by the sight of your body taking in his magic. Sometimes he did muse aloud, though. In his hands, magic was mostly illusory. He could fill a room with identical replicas of himself, but they always disappeared at the slightest touch. He could conjure the images of other people—enemies, strangers, family—and he could make them move and speak realistically enough to convince anyone else of their existence, but they always disappeared into those shimmering lights. In a fight, he _could_ conjure a solid blade into his hands. He was never truly unarmed, because a burst of magic could give him what he needed in order to keep himself safe. But he’d never considered that his magic could be protective. Something about the look in his eyes, and the sound of his voice, when he talked to you made you suspect that perhaps your strange abilities were making him rethink his own. He’d never dreamed of something like your shields. 

And there in the darkness, he told you that they made him feel better. Knowing that you had a piece of him that you could use to keep yourself safe, it made it easier for him to leave you alone when he was sent out with the others. In his worst moments, when he thought back on the man he’d been before, it used to terrify him. His past haunted him and made him worried that he could, one day, be forced to hurt you. But if even _he_ could not slip past your protection, that was a small comfort. He was glad that you had a real way to protect yourself from him. When he confessed that to you, you’d sat up a little to take him firmly in your arms and spent the rest of the night trying to convince him that you knew he’d never hurt you.

The first time your shields took the offensive, you were deep in the heart of a HYDRA base. It was your fault. You’d let your guard slip just long enough for someone to grab you and smash a large hand over your mouth and drag you to some room behind locked doors. They weren’t especially forthcoming about what they intended to do with you, but they’d stomped your earpiece immediately and gave you a sickening grin. You held your tongue. 

A woman had come in, carrying a large tray of instruments which glinted in the harsh lights, and she placed it wordlessly on a stand not too far from your chair. Even in your state, you recognized it as an intimidation tactic. But what could have been their ultimate goal? They weren’t dumb enough to think that SHIELD had entrusted someone like you with enough information to try to torture it out of you. Nat was still out there somewhere, and Thor and Loki, and it was only sheer luck that led them to capture you in the first place.

A third new agent joined you a little bit later, then, and sat directly across from you with a benign look on his face. He’d asked you questions, but you held your tongue. He picked up a scalpel and turned it over in his hands as he reminded you how easy you could make this—or how difficult. You’d slipped a little, then, and hadn’t been able to keep from rolling your eyes. 

That pissed him off. Despite his best efforts at coming across as cold and heartless, you’d caught the way his eyes had flashed, and he stood up quickly to slash at your cheek. The scalpel was sharp enough that you didn’t feel the cut, but you did feel the warm rush of blood that began to flow. Something surged in your chest—not anger, not fear, but power—and, without warning, your shield burst out of you, brighter and sharper than ever before. He had just enough time to stare at you with wide eyes before the shield cut through him and sent him tumbling to the floor.

You felt frozen. 

You were still bound to the chair, but the threat was gone. And all you could feel was grim satisfaction. 

There was a commotion outside the door, and then deep alarms tore through the base, and then Thor was standing in front of you, breathing hard. You saw the way he took in the sight of the HYDRA agent, but he tore through your restraints and helped you to your feet without a word. 

On the way home, Nat stitched up your cheek and welcomed you to the battle wounds club. Maybe that made a little too much pride swell in your chest, but you did your best to hide it. Thor had a thousand questions for you about how you’d done what you’d done, but the only answer you had for him was a simple ‘He cut me, and then I cut him’. You hadn’t _meant_ to do it. Even if you’d known that it was possible, you weren’t sure you could have brought yourself to do it on purpose. 

You could feel the rage seething in Loki. He held your hand too tight and didn’t let go of you for anything. That was fine, honestly: maybe you appreciated the way he served as an anchor for you and kept you from spinning off into panic about what could have happened.

He insisted on still another round of tests with Bruce, and did not relent until Bruce had proven to him, over and over again, that you had not been damaged in any way by this strange new use of magic. Bruce sensed your need for privacy and ducked out of the lab after making eye contact with you and nodding slowly. 

You turned to Loki. He was so stiff and tense. You said his name, but he didn’t relax. He did let you approach him, and didn’t try to pull away when you slipped your arms around his waist. You hid your face in his chest and held him tightly. 

“I’m fine, Loki.”

“You can’t possibly know that. None of us can.” He still sounded angry, but you knew that none of his anger was meant for you. It was for the dead agent, or perhaps for himself, or even for the others, for not finding you sooner. You hummed your disagreement and rubbed your face against him.

“I can too.” You drew in a deep breath of smell of him. He smelled warm and rich and spiced. Already he smelled like home to you. Your heart fluttered in your chest at the realization. “I feel good. With a little help from you, I kept myself safe.”

“You should not have had to.” The weight in his voice told you everything. This wasn’t anger, necessarily, but guilt. You didn’t often go on missions together. He didn’t often learn of the danger you’d been in when you were out there, and he’d _never_ learned of it firsthand like this. You didn’t have to look at him to realize that he thought he should have known. He thought he should have been able to prevent this from happening. You knew better, of course.

“That’s kind of the whole point of this job.” You kept your voice as light as you could. Just because you understood why he felt the way he felt, and just because you knew that it was a little irrational, didn’t mean that you had any right to just dismiss it outright. “How many times have you been in situations like that? How many times have you had to fight your way out?”

He didn’t answer, which was, in itself, a kind of answer. You laughed quietly and held him a little tighter. “It’s okay. I’m _here_ , Loki.”

At long last, he put his arms around you. It would be okay. You felt him press his face against the side of your head even as he enfolded you with his arms. He was quiet for a long while, and you could only hope that he was allowing himself to soak in the feeling of you right there against his body. Then you heard him draw in a breath and pull away a little, just enough so that you could understand his words. “I’m going to teach you to use this to fight,” he said, determination coloring his words. “If anyone ever lays a hand on you again, I want them dead. Wiped from this realm and any other.”

“Yes, Loki.” You lifted your chin so you could look up into his eyes. Anger was still present in his features, but he did allow his face to soften when he saw you looking at him. In return, you smiled at him. “Does that mean you’ll have to keep touching me the way you do?”

His brows grew heavy, and he snarled playfully at you before ducking down a little to press his lips against yours. Again, when he spoke, he barely moved away from you. “Even the gods will not be able to save the fool who dares to try to make me stop.”


End file.
